What is the Talmud to the Jew to-day? It is literature rather than law.
He no longer goes to the voluminous Talmud to find specific injunction
for specific need. Search in that vast sea would be tedious and
unfruitful. Its legal portion has long been codified in separate
digests. Maimonides was the first to classify Talmudic law. Still later
one Ascheri prepared a digest called the "Four Rows," in which the
decisions of later Rabbis were incorporated. But it was the famous
Shulchan Aruch (a prepared table) written by Joseph Caro in the
sixteenth century, that formed the most complete code of Talmudic law
enlarged to date, and accepted as religious authority by the orthodox
Jews to-day.
I have already referred to the literature that has grown out of the
Talmud. The "Jewish Encyclopedia" treats every law recognized by nations
from the Talmudic stand-point. This will give the world a complete
Talmudic point of view. In speaking of it as literature, it lacks
perhaps that beauty of form in its language which the stricter demand as
literature _sine qua non_, and yet its language is unique. It is
something more than terse, for many a word is a whole sentence. Written
in Aramaic, it contains many words in the languages of the nations with
whom Israel came in contact--Greek, Roman, Persian, and words from other
tongues.
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